I stepped back into the hall and closed the door. I had to take a deep breath to compose myself before returning to the kitchen.
"Awwight?" said Stinx.
"Fine. I'm just popping upstairs a second."
I had to go and check on Sarah and Mo. Sometimes demons bring others with them. It's like a low-level virus. I opened their bedroom door. There was enough light from the landing for me to see them sleeping, and to see all round the room, but after what had just happened downstairs I had to be sure, so I switched on the bedroom light.
Sarah stirred in her sleep; Mo slept on. Nothing had got in. Nothing was attending on them. I was relieved. It wasn't that I expected it; it was that I had to reassure myself. The demon in the living room had come in on Stinx.
Sarah and Mo lay on their sides facing each other, unthreatened. Their light, sleeping breath on each other kept them safe. They reminded me of Mandy and myself when I was the same age as they were now. They were on high ground. They hadn't yet fallen. Their innocence made me want to smile, to weep.
I went back downstairs. "Look, there's a box room. If you're not comfortable in the living room you can get your head down there instead."
"No, I'll be all right. I must have been dreaming. Couldn't drag myself out of it, sort of thing."
"Whatever you say."
It would make no difference where he chose to sleep. The thing would simply reappear in whatever room he chose to be in. The demons wait you out and leave when they're ready. That's all they do. I didn't like the shape of the thing I'd seen in the living room, but I knew from bitter experience there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing nothing nothing.
Yasmin's persistence was quite surprising. She emailed me. I ignored her. She emailed me again. Why, I didn't know. After my behaviour in jumping out of the taxi cab and later on the Embankment she should have learned that I'm a poor nutter and left me alone.
But of course I wanted to see her. I just couldn't handle being alone with her. My social movements were pretty much limited to the Candlelight Club and I couldn't take her out for an evening with the boys. For one thing, women were not allowed in the Candlelight Club, and for another thing, no woman in her right mind would want to spend an evening with us. But then a solution presented itself.
I called Yasmin. "Do you want to come to a book launch with me?"
"A book launch?"
"Yes. An old friend of mine is publishing a book. Chap by the name of Charlie Fraser."
"Never heard of him. What should I wear?"
If the invitation to the launch of
How to Make Friends with Demons
by Charles Fraser had taken me somewhat by surprise, I surprised myself even further by the idea of taking Yasmin along with me. Anyway, my curiosity had been piqued enough to want to go, and I thought it offered a good opportunity to be with Yasmin, but not be alone with her. We had some trouble finding the place. The venue for the book launch was a small New Age store in Hampstead and the wine they served was unspeakably New Age, too. It had been fermented from English blackberries and positive thinking, but everyone in the place was holding their glasses up to the light and saying,
How to make friends with demons? Not by offering them this footwash, haw haw haw!
There was a small tower of Fraser's books by the till near the doorway. Yasmin lifted a copy from the pile and leafed through it. "You're mentioned at the front," she said.
She showed me an acknowledgements page, where I was included in an unnecessarily long list of names. In fact, I was referred to as "the inspirational William Heaney who triggered the search." I was taken aback to be so feted. That is to say, I didn't at all want to be feted.
"Fame," said Yasmin.
I shook my head and flicked through the book. It was a lot of hooey, but sandwiched between the spiritual waffle was a ritual laid out for the reader to follow. It looked rather familiar.
"Bugger!" I said to myself, but aloud. "He's only gone and published it."
"Published what?" said Yasmin.
I didn't want to answer. I didn't want to tell her that Fraser had published a half-baked ritual that I'd composed out of fragments of arcana and magical lore a quarter century ago. A fraudulent, unfinished ritual that had been successful in the summoning of dark entities for which
demon
was the only available word in my vocabulary. He'd only gone and encouraged the spiritual tourists amongst the general public to have a go for themselves.
I was still flicking through the pages in astonishment and displeasure when a transsexual publicist from the publishing company pointed out that the ones on display had to be paid for. I returned the transsexual an evil grin and restored my copy to its pile with a slap.
"I'll buy one," said Yasmin.
"No you bloody well won't."
I could see Fraser at the back of the shop. He was ebullient, glad-handing everyone, tipping back the wine. He wore a black shirt with too many buttons open and the fabric was soaked with sweat as he worked the small room. I knew that he had clocked me and Yasmin when we came in because he looked away too quickly, deliberately burying himself in an intense one-to-one conversation with an anorexic lady in beaded headgear.
"Come on," I said to Yasmin. "I'll introduce you."
I went back to the pile of books, grabbed one, and made a direct approach to the Great Author. Taking out a pen, I loomed over him. I had to break up his conversation with the girl in the beaded hat. "Sorry," I said, "but would you?"
His jaw slackened, and then he pretended to be glad to see me. He signed the book with a flourish. Huge loops in his signature. Best wishes. "Can I introduce you? This is Yasmin."
Yasmin held out her hand and he shook it and enclosed it with his other hand. "William was always so lucky with women."
She glanced at me and then said something to him about looking forward to reading his book. Finally he released her hand from between his paws.
"I acknowledge you in the book," Fraser said.
Such largesse.
"So I see. I'd like a word when you get a moment," I said.
"Well, not now. Obviously."
"When?"
"What about?"
"Well, I won't say that now. Obviously."
He looked around. For a moment I thought he was going to call over his transsexual publicist to strong-arm me out of the shop. Then he decided to write down his address. At first he was going to write it in the fly-leaf of the book, but he thought better of it. He produced a dead betting slip from his pocket and scribbled on the back of it.
"We'll talk at length another time, William. I have so many people to see here right now." He turned to Yasmin. "A thrill to meet you."
"And you," said Yasmin. "Good luck with the book."
Fraser quickly turned to someone else.
I backed away towards the till, paying for the signed book under the baleful eye of the publicist. Fraser tipped back another glass of gut-rot, glancing at us out of the corner of his eyes. I waved cheerily, effusively even, not needing to sour his evening any further.
We stayed another few minutes at least. Then Yasmin set down her glass between a dish of peanuts and a display of books about self-hypnotism. "I can't drink any more of that," she said.
"Me neither. Let's go."
We slipped out. Just as we were leaving, a cab pulled up, spilling a couple onto the pavement. Yasmin dug me in the ribs. "Look who it is!" she whispered. It was the poet Ellis with his new squeeze. They were clutching invitations for the book-launch.
What a small world publishing is, I thought.
I ducked back into a neighbouring doorway. Yasmin must have thought that I was embarrassed for him to see us together. It wasn't that: I didn't want him to tackle me about his copy of
Pride and Prejudice
because I had nothing to tell him.
Though he hadn't spotted us and we didn't stick around to say hello.
Yasmin and I adjourned to the Dove, a seventeenth-century riverside pub with an open fire to take the chill off the tongue after the blackberry wine. Graham Greene drank there. So did Hemingway, but not with Greene. Oh, who cares who drank there? I was more preoccupied with Fraser. Seeing him in the flesh had triggered it all off again.
"You're not quite with me tonight," Yasmin said.
"Am I not? I'm sorry. It's that wanker Fraser. He stirs up memories."
"Want to tell me?"
No, I bloody didn't. I was thinking about what he'd told me that day after I'd cornered him while he was lecturing his class. I distinctly remember him using the back of his hand to wipe creamy foam from his upper lip. "That's what I was trying to tell you," Fraser had said to me in the Red Lion in Ealing. "That's what all the messages were about."
By "messages" he meant wads of paper stuffed in my pigeon hole, and the confetti of folded notes that had been shoved under the door. I'd scooped them up and binned the lot without opening a single one.
Fraser had drummed his fingers on the table. "I mean, it was a nasty accident, that business with the bouncy castle blowing away."
"But we were told she was dead!"
"Well, we were told she was in a coma. Or at least I was. That's not the same thing. Anyway, Lin made a complete recovery. Shortly after you left the college she was back, pulling pints behind the student bar, none the worse for it."
"Well, I'm glad to hear of it; of course I am," I told Fraser. "But what about Sharon? What happened there?"
"Ah," he said. "Well, that was different. The Sharon Bennett who ended up doing time in Australia wasn't the same Sharon Bennett we went to college with. I mean it's a common enough name. Somehow it got reported back wrong. Chinese whispers and all that."
"So what did happen to Sharon? Our Sharon? I mean the Sharon I used to go out with?" I didn't want to give Fraser the satisfaction of saying "the Sharon in the photograph above the floor-chalked pentacle in the attic at Friarsfield Lodge."
"She'd just dropped out. Bit of a case, wasn't she? You said yourself she was space cadet."
I remember biting my fingernails—not normally something I do. "But the other two?"
"Sadly, that was . . . "
So two of the girls had died. Rachel and Sandie. But two don't make a pattern, do they? One swallow doesn't make a summer, and neither do two. You need the full five swallows, I figured.
I had to ask. "Did you ever hear anything of Mandy?"
He tugged at his earlobe before answering. "Occasionally I'd hear from her over the years. Then all contact stopped."
"Did you see much of her after I left?"
"Oh, for God's sake, William! You just upped and left her without a word. She was in a terrible state."
I couldn't bear the thought that Fraser had been the one to "comfort" her after I'd left. But I couldn't stand to press the matter with him, either.
That day I didn't tell Fraser anything about my last actions before leaving college all those years earlier, and perhaps I should have done. If there was anyone in the world who would have understood and even supported my actions it would have been him. But I never alluded to my farewell ritual; I never hinted that I'd tried to save Mandy from what I'd thought was certain disaster; and I made no reference to the fact that a demon had appeared to me in the form of Dick Fellowes to strike a bargain.
The nearest I ever came to raising the matter of our attic adventures was to ask, "Did you ever get any more visits from Dick Fellowes?"
"He had the attic scrubbed out, fumigated and redecorated. He even performed some kind of blessing on the place, apparently. But then he left under a cloud himself."
"Oh, what was that about?"
"Well, you know these religious types. Nude boys or some such thing."
Strolling by the Thames with our coat collars high, blinking at the lights: this had become our favourite activity. Being part of the city but safe from its currents and its tides; watching the commuters, watching the commerce, watching the passage of people and the burden of bridges spanning the great river.
It was a way of being with Yasmin and yet hiding from her. We talked: for God's sake we talked interminable talk, but I never told her anything. She knew nothing about my twilight activities. She never even asked about my odd connection with Fraser, and why I was acknowledged in his recently published book. Of course I wanted to tell her but I had too razor sharp a sense of how it would sound.
With our fingers interlaced as we strolled the Embankment the cold didn't seem to reach us and the damp didn't penetrate. And if we did need to rest or to get warm there was always the cheer of the London pub. We walked, we drank, we talked.
Sometimes I would stay out just so I didn't have to face the mess Sarah and Mo were making of my house. One night I got home to find a lot of trash and papers gusting around the rubbish bin. I decided I really was going to have to speak to them about it.
I was tidying up the rubbish when the front door opened and Sarah appeared in her socks. "Oh, you're back! Someone has been trying to get in touch with you."
"Can't you keep this place tidy?" I had to shoulder my way past her just to get into my own house. "Who was it?"
"He wouldn't say. He tried twice, though."
I went through to the kitchen, ignored the unwashed dishes and the piles of laundry and opened a bottle of rather handsome and spicy Brunello di Montalcino. I was in that sort of mood. Mo was at the table eating breakfast cereal. It was seven o'clock in the evening, for goodness sake. "Did this person say what he wanted?"
"Well, he wanted to speak with you."
"Yes, obviously he wanted to speak with me, but what about?"
"He didn't say."
"Did he leave a name?"
"No."
Did he leave a number?"
"No."
I looked meaningfully at Mo, who was busy spooning milk and cereal flakes into his cherubic mouth. "So to all intents and purposes he may as well have not have called, you may as well not have answered and you certainly may as well not have told me about it."